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exceeded that of Henry. On 14 October 1754, following the death of his brother, he inserted in the Public Advertiser a notice which invited victims of crime to inform John Fielding who would ‘immediately despatch a set of brave fellows in pursuit, who have long been engaged for such purposes, on a quarter of an hour’s notice. This became a regular feature of John Fielding’s campaign against crime and in 1755 it was followed by his treatise entitled A Plan for Preventing Robberies Within Twenty Miles of London , 36 an ambitious scheme involving extensive patrols on foot and on horseback, which did not become fully effective until fifty years after John’s death. In the meantime, he instituted eight-man mounted patrols in Westminster, paying each man 4 s a night. Foot patrols were paid 2 s 6 d a night and led by a Bow Street Runner, as the constables were now called. He paid his regular Bow Street Runners 11 s 6 d a week and encouraged them to supplement this income with reward money from victims of crime who had recovered their possessions – an orthodox version of Jonathan Wild’s methods. Fielding and Welch continued to be paid from the Secret Service fund. The Runners at this time enjoyed no official status, though Fielding did issue them with batons which carried a gilt crown to symbolise the authority which, strictly, they did not have. It is the ancestor of the police truncheon. The Runners’ finest hour came in 1820 when twelve of them scaled a ladder to enter a hayloft in Cato Street where, with much violence, they arrested the Cato Street conspirators who had planned to murder the government and seize the Bank of England.
    John Fielding was particularly unsympathetic to the successors of Jonathan Wild who organised crimes and then informed on the perpetrators. In 1756 four such thief-takers were convicted of inducing others to commit robberies for the purpose of informing on them. They were placed in the pillory where two of them died. Grasses were no more popular in the eighteenth century than they are today. His measures against the unsophisticated criminals who had frequented Covent Garden were so successful that many of them left town for less well-protected communities. In 1772, therefore, he began to publish The Weekly or Extraordinary Pursuit , which sent to country Justices of the Peace details of crimes and of the criminals who had fled from London. This was the first attempt to establish any kind of national intelligence service on criminal activities. Its name was changed to The Hue and Cry and in 1883 responsibility for its publication was assumsed by the Metropolitan Police under the title The Police Gazette . It continues to be published.
     
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The Cato Street Conspiracy : a plot hatched by a group of radicals and named after the Marylebone Street where they met to prepare their plan to murder much of the cabinet at dinner in Grosvenor Square in February 1820. The heads of prominent members of the cabinet would then be impaled on poles and paraded about London, thereby inciting a revolution which would overthrow the government in favour of one committed to the egalitarian ideas of Thomas Spence who, before his death in 1814, had advocated the division of land equally between the population of Great Britain. The leader was a man called Arthur Thistlewood, but the plan was betrayed to the authorities and by the time the conspirators arrived at their rendezvous a Bow Street magistrate, Richard Birnie, was waiting for them with George Ruthven, a government spy and the twelve Bow Street Runners. One of the runners was killed by Thistlewood, but all the conspirators were eventually arrested and two of them agreed to give evidence against the others. According to The Observer , the Cato Street building became an object of macabre interest and was visited by thousands of people. Five of the conspirators, including Thistlewood, were executed at Newgate on 1 May 1820 and five were sentenced to